


Fumus Machina

by janjanfollower



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drug Use, Gen, Recreational Drug Use, the stoner au no one needed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-07-13
Packaged: 2018-07-23 17:36:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7473474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janjanfollower/pseuds/janjanfollower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once a month, in a third-floor apartment in Bay Ridge, two twins host a small party for their friends. Also titled: The First Time ever Keyleth Smoked Weed</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fumus Machina

**Author's Note:**

> Just to make it like, abundantly clear to all: don't do illegal drugs, they're dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. And if you know what you're doing, then this fic will relate to you a lot, eyyyyyy
> 
> This is like 90% self-indulgent by the way, so. If this seems hard to relate to sorry about that, there's so much I can write about these fictional characters getting inebriated on the combustion of marijuana. Enjoy!

"Maybe I shouldn't smoke," Keyleth said as she looked at the apartment building, Percy pulling the car into park as the radio turned off. "I mean, you're going to need a designated driver by the end of the night, and I don't want you to drive high."

"I've driven on drugs before, Keyleth, it's not that hard." Percy wasn't even looking at her, instead reaching for a backpack in the backseat that he'd thrown in as they left for Vax’s and Vex’s. "And we're most likely going to be staying for the night; we're going to forget to get home before three."

"Wait, we _a_ _re_?! You should've told me, I would've packed pajamas!" Keyleth dropped her jaw, echoing Percy's movements and opening her car door while still looking at him in disbelief. If she knew this was going to be a whole thing, she would've packed more than... Well, more than _nothing_.

He shrugged, and it left a more concerning than comforting taste in her mouth. "I've done it before, and you and Vex are the same size. I've borrowed Vax's clothes for the night, it's not as though they would mind." Keyleth frowned, pouting her lower lip a little (she knew it usually got Percy to at least relent). When Percy only kept walking forward, pressing the call button for their apartment, all Keyleth could do was sigh and follow him upstairs.

She hadn't been to their apartment many times before (only enough times to count on one hand and those were more for business than for pleasure), so she followed Percy up three flights of stairs in relative quiet, taking in the slowly aging building and the stained glass in the stairwell that she guessed would've lit up with color in the daytime. When Percy knocked on one of the four grey doors of this floor, she was worried for a half-second that they were at the wrong apartment before Vex answered.

"There you guys are!" she said happily as she opened the door wider, letting Keyleth peek inside to see Vax sitting at their couch in front of the coffee table. "I was worried there was a lot of traffic. How was it getting here?"

"It was fine," Percy said, returning Vex's hug. "Honestly considering that it's Friday it could've been so much worse." Keyleth slowly edged her way into the apartment, unsure of where to be until she heard Vex call to her.

"Darling! It's been so long, how are you?" she called, holding out her arms. Keyleth returned her hug, not nervously but still unsure where to place herself.

"I'm good, I've been good. I'm guessing Trinket's been good too?" She smiled, and even before Vex had a chance to answer she saw the runt Mastiff-Newfoundland mix nuzzle himself against Percy's knees, tamed and calmed in this crowded hallway.

"He has. We changed his food so he hasn’t had any other stomach problems. Come in, come in, you can keep your shoes on if you want." Vex walked back out of the hallway and sat herself back onto the couch, letting herself bounce before she leaned forward to change the TV channel. On just a cursory glance Keyleth was able to see three glass spoon-shaped tools, two of them tinted black and one freshly clear and vibrant in its color. Next to those spoons was a taller tube-shaped glass piece that looked to be separated into three chambers, each divided by a honeycomb filter. Vax was putting something into the larger glass instrument, picking up pinches from a black cylinder and putting it into a small glass cup connected to the bottom chamber. A flutter rustled against Keyleth's stomach, her anxiety growing as she watched Vax handle illicit drugs, and she turned towards the kitchenette instead, her back to Vax and Vex.

Standing in front of the counter next to the stove, she saw two people seemingly focused hard on something. At least a foot taller than his companion, Keyleth saw a heavily-built male in a Dallas Cowboys shirt, his beefy fingers dexterously wrapping a cigar, and to his right was a five-foot girl with her white hair hastily tied into a bun, rolling her cigar wrapper back and forth in her fingers. The names immediately sprung out of Keyleth's mind, recognizing the girl as a classmate from her Modern Religions class last semester. "Pike?" she asked.

Pike looked up, her focus dropping as she went into a bright smile and waved at Keyleth. "Oh hi Keyleth! I didn't know you were friends with Vax and Vex," she said, her eyes wide and bright as she continued rolling the wrapper back and forth in her fingers.

"You two know each other?" Vex asked from behind Keyleth. Pike nodded, explaining how they met in class and then kept talking after the semester ended.

"How do you know the twins?" Pike asked Keyleth, looking down for a minute to lick the seam of the wrapper. This all felt so surreal, Keyleth thought as she explained, holding her upper arm.

"I work at the veterinarian Vax and Vex went to when they first adopted Trinket. I kept tabs on them to make sure he was doing well, and we just started talking more and more." Pike nodded along, putting the cigar down next to another three hand-wrapped cigars. "I didn't know that you, Pike..."

"Oh, yeah, I mean, yeah," Pike stammered, her cheeks going slightly rosy. "Whenever Grog is off-season this is how we relax together. Especially since our school isn't too great, the coaches don't care a lot about marijuana positives."

"They only care about that in pro," the beefy voice behind Pike clarified, not looking up. "At college level, no one gives a shit." He looked up at Keyleth, giving her a wink before he stacked his cigar next to Pike's. "Think five's enough for us?"

"It's not as if we don't have more to wrap," Vax chimed in, leaning back in the couch from his glass tube. "And Scanlan smokes like a fucking chimney."

"Scanlan's here?" Keyleth asked Vex, who nodded.

"He's getting takeout and snacks right now."

"But we also have three bowls and a bong, do we need to wrap more blunts?" Pike asked.

"Four bowls," Percy chimed in, pulling out a helix-shaped glass pipe that at one point looked like it was tinted a navy blue. "But I think me and Keyleth are going to babysit this one."

"You just don't want to share your cool toys with us laymen," Vex smirked, crossing her legs as she leaned back into the couch. Pike snickered.

"I seem to remember that the last time I brought my piece here it was shattered rather unceremoniously." Percy gave Vex back a coy smirk, cocking his head to the side as he raised an eyebrow. "And that was an expensive piece, if I remember correctly."

"Not my fault if you buy a china-glass bowl for full price, _Percival_. I can always teach you how to haggle, you know."

From the kitchenette Grog groaned. "If you two are done flirting?" he interrupted, looking at his phone. "Scanlan's coming right now; have you two tits packed?"

"The bong is packed, and my grinder still has plenty in it," Vax said, screwing closed his black cylinder. "I still have no idea where he has his contact, this has to be close to an ounce and we planned two weeks ago."

Vex shrugged, still changing television channels. "Where does he get _anything_? Scanlan just knows everyone."

"I'm going to wrap another, just in case," Pike said, turning again to the counter. Grog watched her then shrugged, walking to the window with the fire escape, opening it to allow the chill breeze to blow in. Keyleth, unsure what to do with herself, walked near Percy and sat on the floor, petting Trinket who laid down next to her crossed legs.

"Okay," Percy said not long after Keyleth sat down, adjusting his seat on the couch to face Keyleth better. "Do you know how to smoke a pipe?"

Keyleth shook her head.

"It's really not all that hard, dear," Vex chimed in before Percy playfully shushed her, making both of the twins smile quietly.

"It isn't, though. When the bowl, right here," he pointed to the indentation in the wide head of the pipe, deep enough to her first knuckle, "is packed, or filled, with weed, you light it. You keep one finger on this," he lifted his index finger repeatedly from a hole on the outside of the indentation, "called the carb, and suck in air to try and let the pipe fill with smoke. When it’s filled, you take your finger off, and you inhale as much as you can."

"So I need to be always sucking?" Keyleth asked, feeling Trinket fall asleep, obviously comfortable.

"You don't breathe hard as you're collecting smoke," Vax said, helping Percy with his lesson. "We'll tell you when to suck, don't worry."

"Yeah I'm sure you will, brother," Vex muttered, matching Vax's glare before he began trying to kick her, Vex laughing wildly and jumping as fast as she could off the couch.

"Ignoring them," Percy tried to get back onto the point. "We'll help you, you don't need to worry. Are you going to be alright? You don't need to smoke if you aren't okay with it," he asked, unscrewing his own metal cylinder—violet instead of Vax's black.

Keyleth blinked, looking away from Percy as she absently pet Trinket. This was all intimidating, being the lone man in a group of people who knew what they were all doing, and the idea of...doing drugs like this felt wrong in a sense that she wasn't able to put into words. But she also knew that smoking this wasn't _bad_ for you, or for your health, and she knew she was in a safe space with close friends and a forgiving environment. She could say 'no' at any minute, and they would be okay with it. There was an anxiety tugging at her heart, demanding to be focused on, but Keyleth knew when it was being helpful and when it was being harmful. And in all honesty, smoking _was_ something she's always wanted to do but never had the resources to. If she wasn't going to first smoke with friends, who would she be smoking with for the first time?

Keyleth looked back up at Percy, nodding and trying to summon a smile through her seriousness. "I'll be alright. If I'm not, I'll let you know,"

A rustling from the door hallway echoed into the main living room, and she was able to see Scanlan holding a white cardboard box with three plastic bags hanging from his elbow. "We ready to get stupid tonight, or what?" Scanlan's voice near-boomed, waking Trinket up, and the laughs from everyone made the smile finally emerge on Keyleth's face.

* * *

 

Keyleth's body felt asleep, pins and needles running through her nerves, but her mind was moving at a mile a minute.

The light from the TV felt amplified, surrounded by the deep night of the apartment with only one light lit from the kitchenette, its almost-amber color contrasting against the somehow blue of the TV. There was a beauty to it Keyleth couldn't quite name, a magic in the mundanity that blew her away, wordless in the awe of the environment the apartment had transported itself to.

Trinket's fur was under her hand as her fingers lightly crimped and released whatever hair she caught. His head was on her thigh and every time he breathed out she could feel it on her opposite leg, now wearing a pair of Vex's leggings. Keyleth's mind had what she felt was almost a short-circuit, a sudden disconnection from her train of thought, and when she snapped back into herself she looked down at the sleeping Trinket. It was incredible, she thought, that on her lap was this beast that, if so inclined, could rip out her throat and kill her without hesitation; but that hundreds of thousands of years of breeding have taught his breed to be friendly to humans, and that it was only through chance of the universe that she could be sitting here with this animal sleeping on her body, one of the most sure signs of comfort between two mammals. It was amazing.

Her mind sparked to an errant post-it note of a thought, seeing herself in a third-person perspective but still within her mind, amazed and impressed with the mundanity of life. She let out a small breath of a laugh, her lips turning up into a self-aware smile.

"You okay?" Keyleth heard Percy ask, and as she turned to face him she saw his normally scrunched-up and somewhat focused face now fully relaxed, whatever wrinkles and deep lines she's noticed for as long as she's known him suddenly gone, his eyes dulled and almost watered. She was used to seeing him tense, every muscle pulled into itself. To see him almost melted into the floor of the living room with his back against the couch, Scanlan's foot dangling on Percy's empty side, made Keyleth happy in a distant part of her mind.

She thought for a moment, words that she knew slugging through her consciousness before they formed the sentences she wanted to say, as if they were in molasses. For what felt like a millennia of thinking (but somehow felt like only a second, time collapsing into forever and immediate) Keyleth slowly nodded, her head feeling like a thousand pounds and that even simple nodding took all her physical strength.

"Yeah," she answered, not to anyone in particular (she couldn't remember if someone said something anyway, or if she was just listening to the movie playing on the TV), but it wasn't until she had actually spoken aloud that she couldn't remember who it was for. A red feeling raced from her chest to her cheeks, not exactly an emotion but rather the emotion of flushed skin, as the frown that her anxiety tried to set in instead turned into a small grin. She looked back at Percy, the closest person to her, who was now also smiling at her. Oh right; they were talking.

Percy laughed - no, _giggled_ \- and the noise quickly became infectious as Keyleth also giggled, her body lolling from side to side, but still the strong joy bloomed from her chest to the rest of her body.

**Author's Note:**

> Seriously, don't do drugs. And more importantly, don't be a Percy and drive on drugs. That's like an even higher rank of bad things you can do.
> 
> Depending on how much this wants to stay in my brain and tinker around, I might add a second chapter to this. Who knows though! We'll see.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
